Overnight Stay: The Mississippi Delta
Explore the richness of the Northern Mississippi region, where you'll find hot tamales, blues clubs, and great barbecue.
Welcome to the weekend!
Today we’re taking you into the heart of the Mississippi Delta, a region many of us first associate with blues music. We’ll hit a great blues club, of course, but we’ll also share our picks for breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner, along with a nice hotel and food shop to round out your visit. Overnight Stay is a monthly feature for paid subscribers that provides recommendations for a single great day in a destination — in past issues, we’ve taken you to Kingston, New York; Charleston, West Virginia; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and many other places.
As a publication that relies on paid subscribers, we’re so appreciative of our supporters, who allow us to dig deep into the culinary culture of each place we visit. We are two curious people who are passionate about restaurants, from fast food to fine dining, and report back on our first-hand experiences. Even if a destination is not on your travel to-do list at the moment, we hope you’ll learn something about a place and its people and get inspired to go see somewhere new. If you’ve enjoyed the work we’ve done at American Weekender — including our free newsletters — that’s made possible by the support of our paid subscribers. We’d love to have your support as well.
A paid subscription gets you many things, including this month’s Featured Field Guide, where we take you to Charlottesville, Virginia. The college town is near where Kenney grew up and we’ve spent a great deal of time exploring this part of the country. This Field Guide includes a 40-page, three-day itinerary with recommendations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks, and more. It’s available for purchase on our website, but paid American Weekender subscribers get this guide, plus our full library of guides and access to our American Weekender Google Map for free. Plus: You can tap into the collective knowledge of our readers for assistance with planning your trips via our chat. Only paid subscribers can start threads, but anyone can chime in with tips.
Before we log off for the weekend, we’ve rounded up a few stories to add to your Weekend Reading list from New Orleans and New England, plus shared a story in Travel + Leisure offering some inexpensive inspiration for your next getaway.
Thanks for reading.
— Amy Cavanaugh & Kenney Marlatt
Detour to the Delta
THE DELTA, MISSISSIPPI — Have you ever had a hot tamale? They’re different from the ones of Mexican origin you may know (and not the cinnamon candy). As the Southern Foodways Alliance puts it: “Tamales from the Mississippi Delta are smaller than Latin-style tamales, are simmered instead of steamed, have a gritty texture from the use of corn meal instead of corn flour, have considerably more spice, and are usually served with juice that is the byproduct of simmering.”
We absolutely love them.
You rarely find this delicacy outside the Delta, so you need to make a visit to this beautiful part of the country to seek them out. While we’re going to send you to three places for hot tamales, the Delta offers much more, including a rich blues scene (there’s the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale and a Grammy Museum in Cleveland) and Delta State University (home to the Fighting Okra; here’s the mascot visiting the world’s largest okra plant), and more. Located between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, this region stretches 200 miles along the northwest corner of the state between Memphis to the North and Arkansas to the West — it is a truly beautiful drive.
When we make our visits to Oxford, Mississippi, we like to add on a side-trip to the Delta, staying at the Cotton House hotel in Cleveland, which is halfway between Greenville and Clarksdale, two of the towns we’ll be sending you to. Besides tamales, we’ll be eating barbecue, drinking coffee, taking in blues shows, and stocking up on local treats to bring home so you can have a taste of the Delta anytime you want.